Software giant Microsoft is likely to gain EU approval for its $26 billion buy of professional social notworking site LinkedIn after making concessions aimed at addressing competition concerns.

Vole last week told the European Commission that it would still allow LinkedIn's rivals access to its software such as its Outlook program and give hardware makers the option of installing competing professional social networks on computers after the acquisition.

This side-stepped the EU competition watchdog’s concerns about tying its products to block rivals, which have cost Microsoft more than 2.2 billion euros. The slight modifications came following feedback from rivals and customers.

The deal, which is Microsoft's largest ever acquisition, will allow the company to add a suite of sales, marketing and recruiting services to its core business products.

It will not make its rival Salesforce particularly happy. It lost out on the bidding for LinkedIn and it urged regulators to examine the antitrust and data privacy issues thoroughly before approving it.

Authorities in the United States, Canada, Brazil and South Africa have already nodded through the acquisition without demanding concessions. The bulk of LinkedIn's $3 billion annual revenue comes from job hunters and recruiters who pay a monthly fee to post resumes and connect with people.

EU anti-trust watchdogs are set to rip a patch out of Google’s bottom line by insisting the outfit stop paying smartphone makers to pre-install Google Search exclusively on their devices.

A 150 page EU document, which has found its way into the paws of the press, has warned the company if it does not do what it is told it could face a huge fine.

Google received a copy in April when the European Commission accused it of using its dominant Android mobile operating system to shut out rivals. The regulators also want to prevent Google from forcing smartphone makers to pre-install its proprietary apps if this restricts their ability to use competing operating systems based on Android.

The Commission's investigation followed a complaint by FairSearch, a lobby group supported by companies that want to ensure they are not disadvantaged by search engine market dominance.

In any event Google could still face a mega-fine because the anti-competitive practices, which started from January 2011, have not stopped

"The Commission intends to set the fine at a level which will be sufficient to ensure deterrence," it said.

The penalty could be based on revenue generated from AdWords clicks by European users, Google Search product queries, Play Store apps purchases and AdMob's in-app advertisements.

European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker made some bold statement about the future of 5G in his State of the Union 2016 speech.

Fudzilla mentioned the speech yesterday where the bosses of EU promise “all European households” to will have a minimum internet download speed of 100Mbps+ by 2025, with businesses and the public sector being told to expect 1Gbps+.

2020 seems to be the magical date. Until then, each EU member state must offer commercial 5G in at least one major city. This means that the 5G trials, as Fudzilla reported, are set to start by 2018 at the latest. The 3GPP still needs to finalize the final specification and until 5G arrives, speeds of the 4G Advanced will get to 1000 Mbps (1Gbps) probably as early as 2017 and things will get even faster rather sooner.

Jean-Claude also mentioned that by 2025 all cities and transport links in the EU should have uninterrupted 5G coverage. From where we stand now, 2025 seems a long way off, but covering all cities and transport links seems like a bold statement.

The European Commission has already voted for the death of roaming charges for consumers set for 15 June 2017. This means that a person from Greece will be able to use her or his phone free of charge in every other country in EU, let’s pick Germany, France, Hungary, Croatia or Lithuania. We chose some random countries, as we cannot list all 28 member states.

The only thing that slightly scares us is the fact that the Commission has been entrusted by the co-legislators to lay down detailed rules on the application of fair use policies and on the sustainability derogation by December 2016. There will be some kind of limitation, as fair use usually means that customers get some kind of limitation. T-Mobile unlimited 4G is capped at 27GB a month, before it slows down. We do agree that 27GB sounds like a lot but bear in mind that Netflix needs 7 GB per hour for UHD (Ultra High Definition also known as 4K). Watching one of The Lord of the Rings movies in 4K would almost burn your monthly allowance.

The European Commission unveiled the European Electronic Communications Code and promises “forward-looking and simplified” rules to make 5G more attractive to investors.

The 3G and 4G licensing was one painful and expensive process and it is highly likely that 5G licensing and spectrum as a part of the usual 800, 900, 1800, 2100, 2800 MHz and a few others you will see 3600 – 3800 for shared small cells, and at least a few others, that will likely need to be paid for and regulated.

Getting 5G to all cities and transport links won’t be cheap either. The EC estimates that the companies will need to invest some 500 billion Euro over the next decade. That is a lot of money.

The European Commission would like to see every local authority offering Wi-Fi in and around public buildings, health centers, parks and town squares. The public voucher scheme has an initial budget of €120 million.

The goal is that all schools, universities, research centers, transport hubs, as well as providers of public services, should have access to speeds of 1 Gb/s, download and upload, by 2025. France for Fudzilla reported(Fiber To The Home) technology with speeds up to 500 Mbps download and 200 Mbps download and charges €36.99. Sweden has 500-1000 Mbps download and 50-100 Mbs for 899 Swedish Kuna’s or some 94 Euro a month. Germany has 400 Mbits download and 40 Mbps upload for 64,99 € and the list goes on.

The future of communication is bright within Europe, as things are apparently going to get much faster.

The European Commission wants “all European households” to have a minimum Internet download speed of 100Mbps+ by 2025, with businesses and the public sector being told to expect 1Gbps+.

The current Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) strategy, which was originally adopted in May 2010, is currently still trying to deliver on its promise of ensuring that very home in the EU can access a 30Mbps+ capable Next Generation Access (NGA) superfast broadband connection by 2020.

However, you have to aim for something we guess and the EU wants to see all schools, universities, research centres, transport hubs, all providers of public services such as hospitals and administrations, and enterprises relying on digital technologies, should have access to extremely high – gigabit – connectivity.

At home all European households, rural or urban, should have access to connectivity offering a download speed of at least 100 Mbps, which can be upgraded to Gbps.

Urban areas as well as major roads and railways should have uninterrupted 5G coverage and fifth generation of wireless communication systems. 5G should also be commercially available in at least one major city in each EU Member State by 2020.

The EU has also created the WiFi4EU plan, which proposes to “equip every European village and every city with free [WiFi] wireless Internet access around the main centres of public life” by 2020. This could present an economic and technical challenge in some of the most remote rural areas.

Andrus Ansip, Vice-President for the Digital Single Market, said:

“Without first-class communication networks, there will be no Digital Single Market. We need connectivity that people can afford and use while on the move. To achieve that, spectrum policies must be better coordinated across the EU. More competition and further integration of the European market will allow us to reach these goals, helped by the right environment created by the new Communications Code.”

LG has decided that Europeans don’t want big screen phones and are not issuing the V20 in that region.

According to the Korean Heraldan LG executive said that while Americans want their phones to match their waist sizes, Europeans like their phones smaller.

This is a bit of a problem for Europeans who disagree and actually want one – particularly now that the Galaxy Note 7 is going to be tied up in recalls for a couple of months.

It seems that LG has missed an opportunity here. The LG V20 is similar to the Galaxy S6 Edge than the Galaxy Note series in design and functionality. Anyone taking a refund from Samsung may be looking for a big-screen Android alternative. The V20 is the first with Android Nougat, the latest version of Google’s OS, already installed.

Of course LG could change its mind but with its typical luck it will decide to go into Europe when it is too late. By the time it gets off its arse and gets the phones into the EU there will be more Nougat rivals and Samsung will have got its act together.

What a pity that LG listened to the rather silly marketing department with its rather weird stereotypes.

The US government is furious that the EU is starting to get hacked off with US companies not paying tax.

What has set them off is the EU daring to ask the fruity cargo cult Apple to pay the going tax rate in Ireland of 12.5 per cent rather than the 0.5 per cent it pays now. The Irish are happy to do what they are told because Apple provides the country with employment. Apple has clearly been on the blower to Washington and ordered the politicians it has bribed, er lobbied, to put pressure on the EU to do what it is told.

Some US politicians have puffed that the EU is trying to cash in on successful American businesses, forgetting that they are not getting any money from Apple either. They are just too scared to stand up to their multi-nationals because the election system over the pond means that they are unlikely to get money from those corporations to get re-elected..

There is a huge amount of hypocrisy about Washington’s objections. A Commission spokesman said that the tax bill comes as a result of a tip off from Washington.

A May 2013 report from the US Senate revealed Apple’s deal with the Irish government to make a large proportion of its global earnings untaxable, which prompted an investigation by the European Commission (EC) the following month.

The US Treasury warned that the bill endangers EU-US economic relations just as efforts to reach a transatlantic free-trade pact unravel. Not that that will bother anyone. The EU is set to reject the trade bill anyway as it favours the US far too much.

The EU action also has the support of Michigan senator Carl Levin, who chaired hearings into Apple's taxes three years ago. He said the EU was only trying to take what US authorities had failed to claim by not closing loopholes that allowed firms to hoard profits overseas.

"The IRS has failed to stake a claim for US taxes on those revenues. So Europe attempts to fill the vacuum. Shame on Apple for dodging US taxes. Shame on the IRS for failing to challenge Apple's tax avoidance."

Marcel Fratzscher, the president of German economic think-tank DIW Berlin, said the incident reflects how global corporations have exploited competition for investment to blunt states' efforts to co-operate against tax avoidance. He said the multi-nationals were pitting government against government to protect their profits.

The EC said in its judgment on Apple that the US and other countries were welcome to try and claim some of the unpaid taxes for themselves.

Professor Louise Gracia of Warwick Business School told E&T that the EU’s ruling is a serious attempt at curtailing the power large multinationals have in avoiding their tax liabilities, and sends a warning to countries that facilitate hard-edged corporate tax minimisation strategies.

"It also shines a spotlight on the paltry levels of corporate tax that large multinationals are actually paying. Even if we accept the job and wealth creation arguments put forward by multinationals as mitigation against tax liability, this has to be within reason,” she said.

The EU is planning to extend telecom rules covering security and confidentiality of communications to web services such as Microsoft's Skype and Facebook's WhatsApp. However it looks like this could be used to restrict how they use encryption.

The EU rules currently only apply to telecoms provider and many of the carriers claim this is unfair.

Orange said that unlike telcos, web-based operations are global players that are allowed to commercially exploit the traffic data and the location data they collect.

Now it seems that the European Commission document wants to extend some of the rules to web companies offering calls and messages over the Internet and make it a little more fair.

Under the existing "ePrivacy Directive", telecoms operators have to protect users' communications and ensure the security of their networks and may not keep customers' location and traffic data.

However, the web based companies are concerned that the moves will stuff up their encryptian systems. The EU rules for telcos allow national governments to restrict the right to confidentiality for national security and law enforcement purposes.

Many tech companies such as Facebook and Google already offer end-to-end encryption on their messaging and email services and they are worried that the new rules will allow governments to demand backdoors..

Facebook, which uses full-scale encryption on WhatsApp, said in its response to the Commission's public consultation that extending the rules to online messaging services would mean they could in effect "no longer be able to guarantee the security and confidentiality of the communication through encryption" because governments would have the option of restricting the confidentiality right for national security purposes.

"Therefore, any expansion of the current ePD (ePrivacy Directive) should not have the undesired consequence of undermining the very privacy it is seeking to protect," the company said.

It is not clear if that is what the Commission wants and might just be a clever bit fo spin from the tech companies. Vice-President Andrus Ansip has spoken out in the past in favor of encryption and the document said that the exact confidentiality obligations for web firms would still have to be defined.

The Commission could also force the companies to allow their users to take a copy of their content, for example emails, with them when they switch providers, according to the document.

The EU executive will propose a reform of the ePrivacy rules later this year, while a broader overhaul of the EU's telecoms rules will come in September.

Ericsson head of European affairs, Peter Olson has warned that new net neutrality guidelines drawn up by EU regulatory body Berec are taking the mobile industry “one step backwards”.

Olson said he liked the original net neutrality regulation, included in last year’s telecoms reform package, but thinks Berec’s interpretation of the package for national regulators is not heading in the right direction.

“I am worried that the implementation guidelines from Berec are actually going one step backwards, it is bringing back some of the language we don’t want to have, which makes it very prescriptive,” said Olson, whose comments were made prior to last week’s deadline.

The GSMA also said that it is deeply concerned about the guidelines which it thinks are overly-prescriptive in their reliance on ex-ante prohibitions, as opposed to the ex-post approach set forth in the regulation.

IT said that the way the draft is worked paves the way to litigation and heads down the back of the garden to the potting shed of legal uncertainty.

Both Olson and the GSMA claim that Berec attempts to introduce a definition on specialised services, which could actually slow down their development.

But Berec appears to be between lobby groups trying to reach some kind of consensus. For example, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) wants Berec to apply strong and clear net neutrality rules.

EBU’s head of European Affairs, Nicola Frank said the implementation of net neutrality rules must not result in the creation of an internet ‘slow lane’ alongside internet ‘toll roads’ which are prohibitively expensive or restricted on the basis of the network’s strategic interests.

Major PC suppliers are jacking up their prices in the UK following the country's brilliant move to show the world that Britain can economically destroy itself without any help from the EU.

Dell, HP and Lenovo have all announced product price hikes just for their British customers to welcome them into the new dystopian world without Brussels.

To be fair, it is not just that the British have stuck two fingers at the thing that gave them relative economic stability for 40 years, it is mostly because the pound has fallen like Donald Trump’s popularity. Something which was costing a euro a pound, turned out to be the pound.

Dell was the first to increase its prices by 10 percent, HP says it is doing the same in order to counteract the pound's decline. Lenovo is expected to do something similar by the beginning of August.

It is bad news for resellers and suppliers who have a hard enough job selling PC hardware without having to make clients pay more for it. We wonder how long it will take for Brits to organize PC cruises to France much like they run booze cruises now.

Still at least the UK can proudly say that it will no longer have an undemocratically elected EU telling it what to do. Instead it is getting an undemocratically elected Conservative leader Teresa May telling it what to do. Apparently that is much better.

The European Parliament voted to spruce up the EU’s cyber security laws in a move which will have many companies tearing their hare (sic) and stamping on their rabbits.

Like most EU directives, it has the somewhat sexy name the Network and Information Security Directive which is shortened to NIS. NIS could mean anything, so everyone can be safely confused, particularly when magazines like ours confuse the matter by calling it the no ignorant stuff-ups directive, which is pretty much what it is.

NIS should be up and running by August 2016 which will mean that if you have an ignorant stuff with your cyber security you will get a visit from a very angry man from Brussels who will make you wish for a referendum so you can escape the consequences.

The cunning plan is to create a harmonized approach to cybersecurity throughout the European Union. All Member States, as well as digital service providers and operators of essential services within them will have to bring about measures to achieve a level of network and information security that is coherent across the European Union.

Each country will have the same rules and people who can handle hacking. The EU will share information on cybersecurity and will improve the security and notification requirements for operators of essential services and for digital service providers.

One thing that companies will have to worry about is that if they are hacked, they will not be allowed to pretend it never happened and point vaguely to the horizon and say “oh look there is a badger with a hand-gun”. Instead they will be required to report the attack to the appropriate authorities and explain how the cock-up happened.

So far there is no mention of penalties for not telling the authorities, but suggestions that the CIO should be burnt at the stake in the company carpark do come to mind.

Like many EU directives this one manages to make itself sound as exciting and relevant as a speech by Matteo Renzi. The only difference is that some of these do actually end up making a hell of a difference, whereas Renzi is a chocolate teapot in all circumstances.

One thing the Directive will define are essential services and there will be national laws requiring operators to obey certain things connected to security. Obviously the key issue is that the essential service has to actually work and be fit for the purpose something that many operators have not quite got the hang of. Try to use a mobile phone in the countryside and you will see what I mean.

But also in areas like Energy, Transportation, Banking and Financial Markets, Health care, Drinking water supply and distribution; and Digital infrastructure will have to beef up their security act.